Fletcher in the News

Professor Moomaw Comments on the Impact of Urbanization on Access to Sanitation

It’s World Toilet Day today — not as much a celebration of the porcelain throne as a call to action to help the 2.5 billion people worldwide who do not have access to a basic, clean toilet.

One in three people around the world do not have access to proper sanitation, according to the United Nations, putting many of them at risk of diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and typhus, and a host of other health problems

About 2 million people — many of them young children — die every year from diarrheal diseases, according to the World Health Organization. Almost 2,000 children die every day from preventable diarrheal diseases — 760,000 children total in 2011, according to UNICEF….

…As populations in developing countries shift from rural to urban areas, people have increasingly packed city slums that aren’t equipped with sewage systems, latrines, basic toilets or readily available clean drinking water, according to William Moomaw, a professor of international environmental policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass.